Thanks to IT, more people can work from home

Unless you work at Yahoo, where CEO Marissa Mayer has banned telecommuting, there's a good chance you work from home or at a coffee shop once in a while.

That's according to Forrester Research, which found some big changes in the way we work when it recently surveyed 9,766 people about how they do their jobs.

Forrester analyst David Johnson said more companies are embracing the idea of allowing employees to pursue flexible working arrangements -- whether that means working from home all day or ducking out of the office to spend a few hours at a Wi-Fi-enabled eatery.

In 2010, 18% of employees polled said that they worked from home at least one day a week. That's now up to 26%, according to Forrester's latest data.

More people are also spending some of their working hours in public places, such as coffee shops. In 2010, about 6% of the respondents to Forrester's survey said that they occasionally worked in public places. Now it's 12%. And Johnson said traveling employees work from public sites more often than not.

Johnson credits IT improvements for this trend. Citing innovations such as faster networks and cloud-based collaboration tools, he said, "all these things make it easier for people to work outside the office."

This version of this story was originally published in Computerworld's print edition. It was adapted from an article that appeared earlier on Computerworld.com.

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